The Modernity in “Two Plays” of the author Ragip Sylaj

Abstract

The play “Banishment from Heaven”, originally “Dëbim nga Parajsa”. The author Ragip Sylaj comes to the reader with a new way of presentation, different in both poetic genre and that of the play he is trying to experiment with. The author is not unknown by the Albanian reader, he is represented in an anthology in Albanian and foreign languages. Despite the popularity of a writer has its own magic of surprise, since the moment he appears, he brings the reader close to himself with the pleasant surprises he presents. Poetry is the most developed genre of the author, without putting behind prose, essay, literary critic, and plays. Moving from a genre to another, of course, has its own difficulty, bringing an “adoption” of the writer. Except for adaption, there is self-finding. Self-finding is the orientation towards the kind of play, which most adapts with the esthetic propensity and the taste of the author. Sylaj, in his experiment on the play, has a clear course towards modern play, but in this case, the referring point is the reader. The modernity of Ragip Sylaj in the play doesn't stay only in the creative way of presenting the plays as anti-play, the hero as an antihero, but also in the text organizing. His “Two plays” can be read as a literary material, but also as purely dramatic texts, but in the last mentioned, the comfort turns into a headache for every director who wants to put these plays on the scene. The “headache” comes because of the fact that the director needs to have a literary material so as to convert it in a theater show needing directing and acting skills. The modernity in Ragip Sylaj's plays is noticed in the absurd “plateau” in which heroes-anti-heroes and drama-anti-drama proceeds. Although this is the basis, the author has managed to keep the basis out of religion. He has managed to make the biblical plot serve the dramatic subject, where the religion is turned in absurd and existentialism. The history of world literature knows many cases of the writers' orientation towards biblical subjects, creating such literary works which have withstood time. Literary History-writing is “born” during European Renaissance, with writers like Leggier, Boccaccio, later on with Dostoyevsky, Bodler, Camus, Proust etc. Each of them has artistically used the biblical subject, bringing us literary materials with creative patterns, symbols, hereafter (hell, heaven, purgatory). F. Kafka in “The Trial” brings us the trial for the Big Sin in an artistic way. The Bible is also called “The book of books”.

Keywords: “Banishment from Heaven”, Ragip Sylaj, modernity, poetry, plays, scene, etc.